by Paul Hill
For the period covered by this book there seems to be a number of different dynamics at work regarding the location of battles. While fords and bridges still feature heavily, there is a noticeable shift towards the importance of centres of economic wealth. Also, the part played by fortifications in military encounters between protagonists becomes crucial, as is shown by the figures in Table 1. Battles in open country do, however, still feature highly.
The list in Table 1 is based on an analysis of battles, sieges and raids mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a number of other sources referring to the years between 800 and 1066. It only includes those military encounters where some sort of clear conclusion as to location can be made. It is not strictly scientific as sometimes there is only have a brief mention of a fortified location but it cannot be said for certain that a recorded nearby pitched battle may have been the relieving of a siege, for example. Not included in the table are the numerous examples of regional devastation–the deliberate reduction of a landscape–carried out by settled Danes or by the Anglo-Saxon king himself. These do not amount to battles, sieges or raids as such, but were a completely different type of military strategy (see pp. 77–9). It should also be borne in mind that the references to battles in ‘Downland/Open Country’ were in reality never far from communications networks, such as roads and track ways that played a key part in the transportation of armies of the period.
Table 1. Where were battles fought (800–1066)?
Pitched Battles
Ford or Bridge 6
Downland/Open Country 16
Pre-arranged Field 1
At River Estuary 2
Coastal Royal Estate or Mint 4
Inland Royal Estate/Manor 5
Coastal Ancient Hillfort 1
At or Near to Inland Ancient Hillfort 1
At or Outside a Port 2
At Anchorage/Moorings 2
At or Outside a Defended or Fortified Place 12
Attack upon a Royal Capital/Citadel 4
Sieges
At Viking Purpose-built/Modified Fortifications 11
At Anglo-Saxon Fortifications 8
At an Island in a River 1
At a Port 3
Viking Raids
Port 13
Devastation 7
But if we are hampered by the question of interpretation, there are still some interesting conclusions to be drawn from the exercise. There should be no surprise at the fact that the Viking raiders chose ports so often, as these were places that were packed with riches, as indeed were the monasteries. But when the Danes were an actual army on active operations within the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, things were somewhat different. Apart from the ‘Downland/Open Country’ category, which we might expect to rank highly, the presence of fortified places and royal centres hints at a game of strategy in the landscape. It is also clear that the Anglo-Saxons besieged the Danes more often than the Danes besieged the Anglo-Saxons. This change in the nature of the locations of battles came about after the Danes had become settled in the Danelaw at the end of the ninth century. Both they and the Anglo-Saxons operated from strategically located fortified bases and for the first few decades of the tenth century warfare became a matter of political geography with the fortification programmes of Edward the Elder (900–24) and his Mercian sister Æthelflæd playing a vital role in combating the Danes in the midlands.
What is missing from the list in Table 1 which was there for the earlier period is the mention of ancient monuments. We know that these places were important. It is certainly the case that there were more prehistoric remains littering the Anglo-Saxon landscape than there are today, but what sort of impact may these places have had on the psyche of the Old English people and how did this translate into the considerations of an Anglo-Saxon general on campaign?
The Old English people revered the ancient landscape around them. The poem The Ruin seems to celebrate the glory of Roman Bath and Maxims II refers to ancient stone fortresses as ‘the work of giants’. Neolithic burial chambers were given names conjuring up images of the English people’s pagan past, such as Wayland’s Smithy in Berkshire. Here, at the site of a long barrow swathed in mystery, was a place where English folklore suggested passing travellers would have their mounts shoed by Wayland the Smith. It is possible that English armies were summoned to these types of places as gathering points for a campaign. Alfred the Great (871–900) did it at Egbert’s Stone in 878, bringing together a large host of men from the remaining shires that still owed him allegiance. Later, in 1006 at the height of King Æthelred II’s (979–1016) troubles with the Danes, the enemy army camped at Cwichelmslow, Ashdown (Berkshire), the site of another ancient barrow. This site was chosen by the Danes after they had raided their way through Hampshire and Berkshire on a destructive mid-winter campaign, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle telling us they ‘ignited their beacons as they travelled’. Cwicchelmes Hlæw (meaning the ‘Hill of Cwichelm’), now known as Cuckhamsley Knob, is on the ridgeway at East Hendred Down in Oxfordshire. It is a place steeped in Old English history, purporting (wrongly) to be the site of the burial place of Cwichelm himself, a Dark Age Anglo-Saxon leader, but most importantly, it became the meeting point for the shire assembly right up until the seventeenth century.
The Danes of 1006, once in position at Cwichelmslow, are said by the chronicler to have ‘there awaited the boasted threats, because it had often been said that if they sought out Cwichelm’s barrow they would never get to the sea. They then turned homewards by another route.’ The choice of site is quite explicit. The Danes knew of the boast of the English. They knew also that this meeting place was a long-established focal point for the Anglo-Saxons and that it was an obvious place to try to bring battle. So, here in 1006 was a potential battle being brought about by a foreign invader whose strategy was to accommodate an ancient English tradition in the landscape. The ‘igniting of beacons’ reference may even have been a ridiculing of the Anglo-Saxon civil-defence system which itself relied upon beacon signals. It could be argued that the Vikings were in fact instigating their own signalling system (for which there seems to have been an historical precedent according to the chronicler) by using advanced parties to mark out the line of march for the main army. A fuller discussion of the use of beacons is included below.
It can be seen that there was a variety of locations for Anglo-Saxon battles. Centres of economic importance and communications networks feature highly, as do fortifications, but if the Cwichelmslow episode of 1006 shows anything it does at least demonstrate the continuing importance of the ancient monument in the increasingly sophisticated Anglo-Saxon military landscape.
The Training of the Anglo-Saxon Warrior
Little is known about what sort of military training an Anglo-Saxon warrior had before he set foot on the battlefield. We may suppose that it was not formal in the sense of regular soldiery. There is no evidence to suggest that the armies of later Anglo-Saxon England were paraded, drilled and marshalled quite like their Byzantine or Middle Eastern counterparts, but we must also accept that because warfare was a way of life for so many men in this era, there will have been a degree of formality behind the preparation of a young man for a life of military prowess.
Although it is a difficult area to find evidence for, it seems that the military tradition among Anglo-Saxon warriors in the early centuries began with the fostering of a young warrior in another man’s household. In the poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero himself went to Hrethel’s household when he was just 7 (lines 2,435–6).
Beowulf spoke, the son of Edgetheow:
‘In youth I many war-storms survived,
in battle-times; I remember all of that;
I was seven-winters (old) when me the lord of treasure,
the lord and friend of the folk, took from my father;
held and had me King Hrethel,
gave me treasure and feast . . .
This poem, written in the tenth century or later, is recalling a practice from the daw
n of the Dark Ages, a pagan rite of passage still a familiar thing to the Christian readership for which the work was intended. The character Beowulf was not the only male figure from the Anglo-Saxon world to embark on a form of training-in-service. Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert describes his subject as entering a boy’s company in his eighth year, ‘the first year of boyhood succeeding from infancy’. Here he learned to exercise, wrestle jump and run. From the Life of St Guthlac and the Life of St Wilfred we gain evidence that the next stage of a boy’s training came at around 14 years of age. Guthlac is recorded as being part of a group of youths that engaged in all sorts of slaughter and pillage by the time he was 15. Wilfred at 14, just before he decided to enter a monastic life, was given arms and horses. Quite how the young Anglo-Saxon boy warrior, or as he is often termed in Anglo-Saxon literature, ‘geoguð’ (‘youth’), trained himself in the skill of weapon play is open to question. It was a long journey for a 14-year-old boy to become a duguð, a fully fledged warrior.
What sort of skills were imbued in the early Anglo-Saxon warrior by the men of his chosen household can only be guessed at. The main weapons of the day included the spear, the sword, the throwing axe and javelins and to a lesser extent the bow. Each of these requires a degree of skill to wield effectively. It may be that mocked-up weapons were used by the young warriors for their training, but evidence is very poor in this respect. We are also badly off for written evidence of how weapon play may have been taught, although the thirteenth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus describes his hero Gram copying the intricate sword strokes of older men such as parrying and thrusting. Hunting may have played a role in the training of the youths, particularly the boar hunt which involved the use of dogs, nets and a spear with a hefty blade to penetrate the hide of the animal. The association of young men with ferocious animals across the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic worlds is well known and is evidenced in names such as Beorn (‘bear’). We might permit ourselves to imagine the constant honing of a young man’s hand-to-hand combat skills during these formative years. It was something we have evidence for among the later Saxon nobility. King Athelstan (924–39), according to William of Malmesbury, ‘clad in the flower of young manhood, practiced the pursuit of arms at his father’s orders’. It is a tantalising suggestion. We do not know who would have been appointed to do the training, but at this high social level, and considering that so much of the military and royal household organisation in tenth-century England was similar in nature to that of the Carolingian Franks, we might assume that the training of princes was a carefully organised matter.
There is some evidence that Anglo-Saxon ealdormen provided a degree of training to the men who followed them if we can believe the descriptions of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon. However, such descriptions have an ancestry in classical writings and may need to be taken with a pinch of salt. There is a passage in the poem that describes how the ealdorman taught, or at least reminded, his men of their training on the day:
Then Byrhtnoth began to array men there,
rode and gave counsel, taught warriors
how they must stand and that stead hold,
bade them their round-shields rightly hold
fast with hands, not at all frightened.
When he had fairly arrayed that folk,
he dismounted among them where it most pleased him,
where he knew his hearth-band most loyal.
It is an image of a commander giving hands-on instructions to his men, but it is unlikely that the thegns who followed the ealdorman were hearing it for the very first time. Byrhtnoth was giving them a reminder of the formations they had practised for years. He was steeling them for battle. We can find other examples of this sort of thing in other literary works of the period. Henry the Fowler (919–36), the Holy Roman Emperor, for example, performed a similar exhortation of his troops before the Battle of Riade in 933 against the Magyars, according to Liutprand of Cremona. Despite the obvious borrowing from antiquity, there may not be any good reason to doubt that the military leaders of the Anglo-Saxon era exhorted their troops on the battlefield.
Unfortunately, as is quite often the case with Anglo-Saxon evidence, there is little that quite matches the compelling evidence available for the Continental contemporaries, particularly that of the Carolingian Franks. Training for them is better evidenced in such forms as the Old Roman causa exercitii, a form of war game in which groups of mounted men charged at each other pretending to unleash their weapons and then retreating in a feigned flight. What little we have for the Anglo-Saxons, however, still shows us enough to conclude that an English warrior will have known how to use his weapons and where to put himself in the shield wall on the battlefield.
There is one interesting but rather late account of the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, or ‘host’, in training. It comes again from the quill of William of Malmesbury writing about the Norman King Henry I’s (1100–35) preparation for the invasion by his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy in 1101. He says that Henry ‘taught them how, in meeting the attack of the knights, to defend with their shields and return blows’. It is an ironic reference. If these men were English fyrdsmen, then it seems they were in the Norman period being prepared to face the onslaught of the mounted knight. One wonders if such training might have helped their forebears at Hastings.
Despite the training received by the Anglo-Saxons from a very young age, and despite the years of warlike preparation for the warrior of Anglo-Saxon England, it still remains the case that the consequences of going to war were profound on a number of levels. These included the personal injuries one might sustain and the political and personal consequences of exile or (and this seems to have been the most depressing of experiences) finding oneself without a lord. Death, of course, was always a possibility. The ways in which the Anglo-Saxons dealt with all these consequences of the violence of warfare are examined below.
Injury, Death and Exile–the Personal Impact of War
The images of the bodies of the dead depicted in the margins of the Bayeux Tapestry make for sobering viewing. Mailcoats are stripped from bodies, weapons collected and seemingly half-naked rotting corpses are left to lie on the battlefield. These indignities really did happen, such was the value of weapons and armour (Fig. 1). One is minded of the remark in The Carmen that bodies on the field of Hastings were left ‘to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs’. A very grim and hardly chivalrous reality.
There are many literary references to the injuries inflicted by the weapons of the age on the bodies of victims. Not least of these is the fate of King Harold at the hands of a group of Norman knights at Hastings, described by the Norman sources such as The Carmen in gory detail. A piercing to the upper body with a spear, a de-capitation with a sword and the cleaving off of a leg tell of the end of a distinguished if bloody life. Indeed, some archaeological work has now shown that the physical effects of weapons in the Anglo-Saxon age were every bit as dramatic as the literary accounts would suggest. Analysis of bones on skeletal remains from a cemetery in Eccles in Kent dating from the Anglo-Saxon period has deduced not only the weapon types used against the victims, but also the nature of the injury as a whole, including its soft-tissue component. There were six male skeletons showing edged weapon injuries to the cranium, each was in his twenties or thirties. Not one of the injuries on these skeletons displayed any signs of healing and it is concluded that the cause of death must have been due to the traumas produced by the weapons. Profuse bleeding to the scalp and a loss of consciousness were factors in the death of the individuals with one victim (known as Victim II) suffering an immediate severing of the brainstem at the first strike. This same victim was also rendered incapable of defending himself (after clearly trying to) because injuries sustained to his arms prohibited him from gripping either a sword or a shield. Apart from one injury attributed to an axe, the blade of a sword or multiple swords is suggested as the chief weapon utilised upon the victims at Eccles, with Victim II receiving addi
tional wounds in the back from a weapon unknown as he was lying prone. Many of the injuries, as one might expect, were to the left side of the cranium, delivered almost certainly by a right-handed opponent, with Victims I, V and VI exhibiting these injuries most clearly. It is evident from the recorded injuries to King Harold, and the examined injuries to the Eccles victims, and to the unfortunate headless Scandinavians whose grim end has been revealed by the trowel of the Oxford archaeologists on the ridgeway at Weymouth, that the body’s most vulnerable areas where there is little protection were the parts most often attacked by the deadly weapons of the day: arms, legs and, above all, the head. There is no doubt that the personal cost of warfare in the Anglo-Saxon period was one of very bloody consequence indeed. One is mindful of Edmund of East Anglia’s saintly demise–tied to a tree in 869 while shot full of Viking arrows. And also, the unfortunate Archbishop Ælfhere, whose ordeal as a hostage was ended with a brutal blow to the head from a drunken Dane in 1012 (pp. 32–3). The personal price was nearly always paid in blood.
Fig. 1. The robbing of the dead on the Bayeux Tapestry.
Another example of the brutality meted out to the victims of warfare comes from 1006 and Uhtred of Bamburh’s relief of a Scottish siege of Durham. The Scots’ heads were cut off and transported to Durham where they were washed by four women and placed on poles above the walls of the city. The women were paid one cow each for their trouble. Sometimes the fate of a victim of war was intertwined with the need to display the power of the victor.
